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Following Emu, bond traders are scouring non-euro EU countries for the next convergence play hot-spots. Now that the main convergence-play currencies of recent times - Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal - are in the euro club, those non-euro countries that might join the euro over the next few years are attracting attention. Greece has emerged ahead of the UK, Sweden and Denmark as the most popular source of convergence plays.

After Brazil, could China's currency be the next to fall? Billions of dollars are said to have gone missing in foreign exchange over the past year - a development that Chinese officials are desperately trying to play down to minimize market jitters over the fate of the renminbi. At the end of 1998, the nation's forex reserves looked impressive at $145 billion. But they had risen by only $5 billion over 1998 despite a record trade surplus and strong inflows of foreign direct investment. Some China specialists calculate that almost $89 billion in trade and investment gains never found their way to the official coffers, despite the country's tough foreign-exchange regulations and central bank controls.

Smart investment bankers - the type who managed to turn catastrophe risk into an investment-grade asset class - should be eyeing up the fruits of litigation reform in the UK. By Christopher Stoakes

Deals of the Year

In Turkey business patriarchs never die, they simply fade away. In the wings their sons - rarely their daughters - prepare to take over, whether they're entrepreneurially inclined or not. But family-owned business heads are increasingly realizing that survival will depend on more formal structures. A few are even putting them in place. Metin Munir reports.

Banks can only sell risk if investors know exactly what they're getting. Institutions with blue-chip corporates in their loan portfolios won't have a problem, but smaller and regional banks find it almost impossible to sell their own risk in the credit derivatives market. Better credit research would help, but above all, they must learn to sell themselves. By Laura Covill.

Turkey: Business must come before family

Deals of the Year

Issuer: Deutsche Bank

The first month of euro trading has come and gone, and the battle for short-term futures contracts rages on. Liffe, Eurex and Matif - the UK, German-Swiss, and French futures exchanges - have been competing for market share of three-month futures contracts since January 4. Already there have been disputes about which has made the most successful transition to the euro and which is most liquid.

Deals of the Year

What do real tennis and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro have in common? Not a great deal, you would think, but Vincent Purton, the 39-year-old managing director of Daiwa Europe's debt origination desk is spending the first week of February heading towards the summit of the Tanzanian mountain, inspired, as he puts it, "by the rather arcane game of real tennis that I play. The professional who coaches us at Hampton Court suggested it last year, and I didn't need much persuading."